Family Night & Conference Club

Since this last week before school is more errands and prepping than fun, I'll do another post on how we're trying to step up our game around here.

Family Night is such a brilliant concept. We've been pretty good about being consistent, but we usually picked a topic to discuss on the fly, or we simply had a family FUN night and played games or went to a movie. Those were good times together, but we realized we could squeeze more out of this than we were. For starters, making sure Family Night happens is now Adele's responsibility. She is in charge of organizing who is teaching and making sure they know in advance and can prepare. With Tennie leaving for university in a few weeks, we've set this up for the rest of us to teach once a month. I created a list of topics for us to choose from, many coming from the skills or knowledge I identified when thinking through what we could do to help them grow spiritually, mentally, emotionally or physically. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it will get us going for the next year or so. The girls will teach something from the For Strength of Youth each month. Our girls are great teachers already, but the opportunity to prepare and ponder a topic, and teach it in an engaging way is great practice for the many times they will teach in the future.

We're also focusing on a character trait each month. This is a weekly, rotating quote on the mirror, and we check in at the beginning of FHE to see what experiences we've had focusing on the trait. This month is self-discipline, which pairs nicely with our habits focus!

Ceci is in charge of Conference Club. We started this a few years ago, but it has been pretty hit or miss, mostly because we forget until we are sitting down. So it is Ceci's job to figure out how to make sure it happens and everyone comes to the table prepared. Basically, one person chooses a conference talk from the most recent general conference, we all come to dinner having read the talk, and the person who chose the talk facilitates a discussion as we eat. This has been a really great way to discuss each talk as a family, but we just have to do it! Ceci is on it, and her process to make it happen is in the works.

I'm realizing again that all of these ideas require a lot of following up and managing on my part, which is often hit or miss. I'm growing and fine-tuning in this process as well, and thankfully have learned that the process of growing is slow, so I don't feel a lot of impatience of discouragement! There is a lot of getting back in the saddle around here!